Title: The Thirteenth Tale Author: Diane Setterfield
Published: September 12, 2006
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 406
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself—all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.
As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.
Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
For six or seven years now, I’ve been eyeing The Thirteenth Tale every time I visited a bookstore. At one point, I went so far as to add it to my TBR, but removed it after a few months. Why? I was rather convinced that Diane Setterfield’s story was not for me (somehow I got the idea this was about a novelist who gets sucked into her own fictional world via magical computer or somesuch). Thankfully, I was finally pushed into reading this by a friend, and I found out that The Thirteenth Tale is indeed a book for me.
This is a book for booklovers. Setterfield’s lush, gloomy first-person narration is full of Margaret’s obsession with books and reading, and it’s something many, many readers will be able to connect with. Beyond that, this is a story about stories—Vida Winter’s story, Margaret’s own story, and the various stories that bring everything else together into a haunting, cohesive whole.
As I said, The Thirteenth Tale was not at all the book I was expecting—in the best way possible. As Ms. Winter reveals her life’s story to Margaret piece by piece, I became wholly engrossed in this story of family and secrets and love. When the plot twist came, it was one I hadn’t seen coming at all; I can’t wait to re-read the book, to see how knowledge of that twist affects things. Already, I can look back and see how masterfully Setterfield constructed this book, right down to pronouns and unspoken hints.
Yet though this book is complex, it unfolds itself in a way that isn’t hard to grasp. The reader always knows exactly as much as Margaret, and as she muddles through thing, the reader also gains understanding. In that way, the mystery of Vida Winter’s life becomes very easy to understand, though the story itself is complicated and involved. Constantly, The Thirteenth Tale is an amazing balance between dark complexity and readability.
Setterfield’s prose is truly amazing here. So many mere observations were surprisingly poignant and meaningful to me. Mundane actions took on a distinctly Gothic atmosphere, and every word added to the tone and setting the author had established. While reading, I frequently thought to myself that The Thirteenth Tale is a gorgeous example of the type of writing I love most but find only rarely. This book is worth looking into, honestly, simply for its prose, though of course there are so many other reasons to look into it.
A modern Gothic, The Thirteenth Tale could be seen as the contemporary answer to the Brontës and du Maurier. Diane Setterfield’s mature, skilled writing kept everything moving at a deliciously engrossing pace, and the story itself was eerie and artful. This is a book for those who enjoy a complex mystery that moves deliberately, and into places you don’t expect.
